Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Star Wars and the Modernism of 2001

In his book, Air Guitar, Dave Hickey argues that, "artistic practice changes because younger artists must willfully misinterpret the work of their masters.” The master that George Lucas was most interested in willfully misinterpreting was Stanley Kubrick.

After Lucas finished making his second film, American Graffitiin 1973, he intended to direct a film about the Vietnam War using a script written by his friend John Milius. Lucas described his original concept for the film asDr. Strangelove in Vietnam. Dr. Strangelove was Kubrick’s caustic satire that lampooned American Cold Warrior’s nuclear bravado. It was Lucas says it was his favorite film.

But the Vietnam War was going so badly by this time it had become too hot politically to get any kind of film on the subject produced, much less a satire. And it wasn't just Lucas who was stymied, for the better part of a decade it no one produced any sort of film about the War (and they stopped making GI Joe dolls as well – that was a drag).

After trying repeatedly to get his film made he decided to shelve Apocalypse Now. Francis Ford Coppola would eventually find backing to get the film made, but by then Lucas was in preproduction on his new project and handed off the directing duties to his friend and mentor.

Lucas says he decided to take the ideas he had been developing for Apocalypse Now and use them as the basis for a space fantasy. Star Wars was Dr.Strangelove-in-Vietnam-in-outer-space. However when it came time to choose a film that would set the visual standard for his new project it would not be the black and white cinematography of Dr. Strangelove Lucas would choose, but rather the Modernist purity of Kubrick's 1968 science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.

When Stanley Kubrick made 2001 it was the most expensive science fiction film ever produced. Kubrick intended to bring a new standard of technical rigor to the genre. To accomplish that he surrounded himself with a highly skilled crew of studio professionals, as well as engineers and designers recruited from the aerospace industry.

The seedbed of 2001 was the 1964 New York Worlds Fair. It was there that Kubrick saw the documentary short To the Moon and Beyond and recruited some of the filmmakers responsible for its visual effects. Douglas Trumbull, who had worked on the short, would be hired as a Special Photographic Effects Supervisors for 2001 and is credited with developing the slit screen technology for the Stargate sequence.

Kubrick's co-author, Arthur C Clarke is most famous as a science fiction author, but he was a trained scientist. The "Clarke Belt," a ring of thousands of artificial satellites now circling the earth in geosynchronous orbit, is named for the author in recognition that a paper he wrote in 1945 predicted the use of these exact sorts of satellites for telecommunications. Clarke therefore was much more then your average scifi guy. He was a well-respected member of the scientific community, with strong connections inside NASA.

Clarke was able to get the anthropologist Louis R. Leakey to advise on the film. For those seeing the film for the first time now, the costumes for the proto-humans might look a little primitive, but at the time they were state of the art. And with Leakey’s help their behavior reflected the most up to date theories of human evolution: Man the Hunter (a theory that is equally out of date as the monkey suits).

Clark was also an acquaintance of Fred Ordway and Harry Lange as well, both of who would be hired as full time technical advisers on 2001. Ordway and Lange were refugees from the American space industry. In the past space craft in Hollywood films had always been designed and built by prop designers. Even the best of these designers, like Ray Harryhausen, were still just studio hacks with no knowledge of aerospace.

Kubrick’s crew was famously professional. They were the best of the best, and they did in fact bring a new level of technical rigor not only to the genre of science fiction films but all genre of filmmaking. They were known at the time as “The Brain Trust.”

When it came time to make his science fiction film Lucas set out to hire as many people who had worked with Kubrick as he could. He hired so many Kubrick alumni that as a group they were referred to as "The Class of 2001." But even so, Lucas was still a young unknown director, and was not able to attract or afford the same caliber of professionals as Kubrick.

For instance when it was clear that he couldn’t get Douglas Trumbull (having directed his own scifi 1972 film, Silent Running, Trumbull was more interested in the director’s chair at the time), Lucas hired John Dykstra to be his effects supervisor instead. Dykstra was hired because he had worked with Trumbull on Silent Running, and Trumbull had worked on 2001.

But all the same, Lucas’s crew was young. They weren’t engineers, or studio hacks, they were film school geeks, like Lucas. And that was just fine, because while Kubrick’s film had been a complex abstract film about man, transcendence, the nature of God and being; and a film that arguably locates the very peak of American Modernist authority and influence, Lucas’s aim was never to reproduce Kubrick's film. He wanted to make a Flash Gorden like space fantasy.

Lucas’ first film the 1971 dystopian THX 1138 was based on a 1967 short Lucas had made in film school. THX 1138 was much closer in tone to the cool abstract Modernism of 2001 (its a really cool movie, but as serious as a heart attack). When Stanley Kubrick began work on 2001 he was inspired by the optimism of the '64 World's Fair, the can-do spirit of John F Kennedy's New Frontier, and the sexy jet-set world of 60s air travel and beautiful young unmarried (and there for sexually available) stewardesses.

The difference in agenda with Star Wars is accountable in history between the time he conceived his first dystopia and Kubrick, his Modernist masterpiece. A lot had happened in the intervening years. America had become a totally different place. And just as 2001 was a film that embodied its moment and place in history, Star Wars reflects the world as it was just ten years later.

Kubrick was not a thoughtless booster of US Cold War policies. He had shown that with Dr. Strangelove which did not paint Cold Warriors in the best of light. 2001 is complex, and riddled with subtle ambivalences, but it showed NASA at its finest. It was a positive symbol of the progress promised by American Modernists that borders on boosterism.

And while the mid-sixties America was shadowed by the assassination of JFK, in her book about the woman's movement, When Everything Changed, Gail Collins paints a picture of that era as still very optimistic. Colin's portrait of the growing civil rights movement and the first stirrings of Feminism—of the polite demands by mild mannered women in hats and gloves and the determined pacifism of African American students in suits—is of a moment of grim fortitude, but in many ways unmarred by any hint of pessimism or cynicism (at least for a time). For all its complexity Kubrick's film reflects that optimism, but none of those struggles.

Although women and blacks were challenging their authority, the Cold Warrior Modernists had managed to keep the sheen of father-knows-best throughout most of the decade. And what ever else he may have been Kubrick was a Modernist master widely heralded as a genius, his films as masterpieces.

How influential was Kubrick? Futura was his favorite font. Helvetica is the font that had been adopted for almost all of NASA’s documents and signage in the 1960s, but it was Futura that was chosen for the typeface on the plaque left by the first astronauts to walk on the moon. It is impossible for me to believe that the choice of Futura as the first font on the moon was accidental.

"There are no Negroes in this vision of America's space program; conversation with Russian scientists is brittle with mannerly terror, and the Chinese can still be dealt with only by pretending they're not there."

Gilliatt had placed her finger on the cracks that had formed in the Modernist's pose of magisterial control.

2001 premiered April 2nd 1968, two months after the American military’s disastrous response to the Tet Offensive; one month after Walter Cronkite (who was recently described as “a reliable mouthpiece for the optimistic scenarios” of the US government) changed his position and broadcast an editorial predicting the war could only end in stalemate or “cosmic disaster; less then a month after the New York Times ram a piece entitled “The Second Feminist Wave” in which, Ti-Grace Atkinson compared marriage to slavery; and just 3 days after President Johnson announced he would not run for reelection - quietly ending the Great Society, and ushering in the reign of the Nixon Administration.

Two days after 2001 made its premier to an audience of Washington DC beltway insiders, Martin Luther King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee. The national mood that Kubrick had projected 33 years into the future had broken like a fever by the time Gilliatt wrote her review. In the first few weeks of 2001’s run riots broke out in over 110 American cities. In DC alone, 13 people were killed in clashes with police and over 6000 arrests were made.

By the time Lucas began work on Star Wars five years later the Kent State shootings in 1970 had further polarized and radicalized Americans. In 1973 the OPEC nations were challenging the US presumption of superpower with a successful oil embargo. And, while it was 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed, it was almost ten years later that women won their first court victory under the provision. "Once the Civil Rights Act was on the books" Collins explains in her book, "it looked as if the section protecting women from job discrimination was going to do nothing but spawn endless jokes about the "bunny law" that, wags predicted would require the Playboy Club to give men equal opportunity to don puff tails and silk ears, and work as one of its scantily clad waitresses." But when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened its doors it wasn't men who walked in:

Yet when the EEOC opened for business, its first complaints were neither oppressed black workers nor men hoping to break into the ranks of the Playboy Bunnies. They were stewardesses. The commission's clerical staff, which had been told their jobs was to help fight racial discrimination, was still unpacking when Barbra Roads, a union leader for the flight attendants, and another stewardess arrived. "We walked in and looked around at a sea of black faces. Their typewriters were still in boxes. This woman came up to us, two blondes in stewardess uniforms, as she said, 'What are you doing here?'"

In The Year Everything Changed, Collins gives special attention to the story of these women, who were measured and weighed regularly; their appearances were carefully policed, as was their marital status. She explains that flight attendants were not allowed to get married - and could be fired if they chose to secretly marry and keep working. Airline Executives explicitly wanted beautiful and unattached young women to attract older married businessmen, prompting Rep. Martha Griffiths, the lone woman on a House Labor Subcommittee, to ask during an open hearing on airline labor practices "What are you running, an airline or a whorehouse? In 1973, after almost a decade in court, flight attendants won a court battle with the airline industry to end the demeaning appearance rules that had shaped a toxic work environment for over a decade.

In 1967 and '68 the House Committee on Un-American activities had been fearlessly ridiculed by the YippiesAbby Hoffman (arrested for wearing a shirt made from an American flag) and Jerry Rubin (curiously not arrested for wearing a North Vietnamese flag as a cape). While the Yippies left the Committee maimed, it took six more years for it to die. After 40 years of abusive investigations, HUAC officially put an end to it's shameful history in 1974.

George Lucas wrote his first treatment for Star Wars in 1973, but it wouldn't be until the May of 1974 that he would complete his first rough draft. He wrote that first draft while His first wife, Marcia Lucas, edited Martin Scorsese's feminist road movie, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Marcia, who had never liked or understood Lucas' first movie THX 1138 edited Lucas' second feature, American Graffiti. "I never said, 'I told you so,' but I reminded George that I warned him it hadn't involved the audience emotionally" Marcia told Peter Biskind for his book,Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. "He always said, 'Emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded, get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.' All he wanted to do was abstract filmmaking, tone poems, collections of images. So finally, George said to me, 'I'm gonna show you how easy it is. I'll make a film that emotionally involves the audience."

So it was in twilight hours of the Vietnam War; in aftermath of the release of the Pentagon Papers and in the growing shadow of the Watergate investigation, but also the wake of 2nd Wave Feminism's greatest victories, the that Lucas conceived and made his space fantasy. While Lucas most often credits the influence of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 had on the look and feel of Star Wars, 2001 most resembles the look and feel of THX's "abstract filmmaking, tone poems, collections of images." In Star Wars the pro-NASA visual program of 2001 was willfully misinterpreted to create a fascist state bent on total control at any cost (even the destruction of a planet). That space stewardesses were replaced by a rebel princess. While John Fitzgerald Kennedy is rightfully associated with the visionary goal of landing a man on the moon, by the time Lucas began making Star Wars it was the manifestly corrupt Richard Milhous Nixon who had achieved that goal.

FAQ: Sith

The Sith are the bad guys in Star Wars. Darth Vader and the Emperor are Sith Lords. They are the Yin or “dark side” to the Jedi Yang.

What does the term Sith mean as it is used on this blog?

Beyond their place in the fictional universe of Star Wars, the Sith are a narrative element of a film made by a particular group of people in a particular time and place. Therefore the Sith have a very real social and political context. And it is this very real world idea that I am referring to in this blog:

Lucas and his crew were young Americans working together at the end of the Vietnam War and in the shadow of Watergate. In the parlance of that era’s youth, the Sith are “The Man.” They stand in for the corrupt authorities of the day as seen by the young people of the day. Lucas describes them as “Nixonian gangsters.”

And like Nixon, the Sith perfectly represent a particular strain of American authority: Cold Warriors. Not just the violence and paranoia of America’s anti-communist foreign policy, but their repressive and absolutist domestic policies: “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the communist party?”

Even the world building efforts of the cold warriors were perfectly embodied by Lucas and his crew. The top-down Utopian art, architecture and urbanism of the Cold Warriors were elegantly re-imaged as the Deathstar.

The Sith are characterized by the same traits that identify the Cold Warriors: they want control; they use a fear of chaos to squash any and all dissent. Their solutions are over simplified and deny the importance of disorder and spontaneity.

FAQ: Jedi

Just as the Sith have a real world context (see above FAQ) so do the Jedi. But just because I believe the Sith were inspired Cold Warrior anti-communists and Modernists, I do not mean to say that the Jedi were Post-Modernists and communists.